I am really getting tired of being victimized by Gnome developers and their horrid new creation Gnome 3. As a happy KDE user, I used to enjoy a lovely desktop experience where my GTK+ and QT apps existed in perfect harmony. With oxygen-gtk, a few font tweaks and unified icon themes, my desktop was seamless regardless of which toolkit an app was written in. Lately, my desktop is a disaster. When Gnome 3 hit the repositories, all my GTK apps looked significantly different (large clunky fonts and missing icons,) some GTK apps crash (segfault) and refuse to start and I no longer had icons in my Firefox bookmarks menu. Does anyone know where to begin trying to fix this?

Yesterday, a new slew of Gnome 3.2 updates came down (Limbo) and now I can no longer launch most GTK apps at all, and the ones that do launch have screwed up titlebars, menus and no icons whatsoever, including Sulfur. Even Compiz's Emerald themer is screwed up with these updates. What the hell is going on with Gnome? It's no wonder Linux will never be taken seriously as a mainstream OS. Developers are constantly pulling the rug out from under users by making drastic changes. The old expression "if if ain't broke, don't fix it" applies with regards to Gnome 3. This is a case where too much choice is a bad thing and we users will only take so much before we decide it's not worth the trouble any more!

Here's the error I get when trying to start Sulfur, for example (all GTK apps give a variation of the same as of yesterday's updates.)

You have my sympathies, and I can't say I'm surprised: I've been expecting GNOME 3 to have a knock-on effect on GTK apps used with KDE. It has not happened to me yet on my main laptop on which I only have Portage installed, but I'm still expecting some GNOME 3-related trouble on that machine at any time when I upgrade some of the GNOME apps I'm using. Actually, I have a suspicion that the problem I am seeing with NetworkManager 0.9.0 on another of my laptops (on which I am using Entropy) -- see NetworkManager 0.9.0 very flaky with wireless network -- is GNOME 3-related, as I think the changes to NetworkManager were put in to make it GNOME 3-compatible. Memories of the hassles with the early KDE 4 releases come flooding back.

cmost wrote:It's no wonder Linux will never be taken seriously as a mainstream OS. Developers are constantly pulling the rug out from under users by making drastic changes.

cmost wrote:This is a case where too much choice is a bad thing...

Completely agree with you on both counts.

All I can suggest is that you file a bug report, pronto, and hope that lxnay or one of the other guys can do something about it. If you've read some of lxnay's blog posts recently, you'll have noticed that he's not exactly chuffed with all this messing around upstream either.

I second all that. Today's large slew of Gnome updates on my KDE machine (I keep Gnome on it for interest) has broken my pychess, my emerald theme and, until I removed it, kept telling me that "In order to use Caribou, accessibility needs to be enabled".My main hope is that I remember the furore when KDE4 appeared and how quickly it has matured. Presumably the same will happen to Gnome.

Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us - Eric Hoffer

Don't believe what it says on the right - I am anything but sagely; More oniony!

yup, just catching up with them now ... be surprised how many in the #sabayon channel has the same issue.We kicking it around and looking for a solution ... not a big deal if this was only limbo ... but is in the main repos also.Put on your seat belts .... going to be a rough ride.

<lxnay|lappie2> the problem is in the workaround proposed by gentoo/other about setting __GL_NO_DSO_FINALIZER=1<lxnay|lappie2> unset __GL_NO_DSO_FINALIZER && gdk-pixbuf-query-loaders<lxnay|lappie2> ^^ works too

I had exactly the same symptoms in Gnome 3 after the 3.2 update. No gnome shell, no window manager, almost no icons. All I could do was open a nautilus window without a WM or icons.lxnay posted the following command on IRC which fixed mine for now. It's only a workaround though.